The following notes represent the beginning of an investigation whose assumptions and beliefs are linked to the daily experience with architecture. Reference will be made to the critical method of analysis and interpretation ...[+]

The following notes represent the beginning of an investigation whose assumptions and beliefs are linked to the daily experience with architecture. Reference will be made to the critical method of analysis and interpretation on which the "Roman School" has defined the theoretical basis. This method aims to identify the permanent characters, which can be read in the different realities constructed in the slow changes that took place throughout history. A history that is not understood as a series of particular architectural episodes in which the special buildings represent the singularity, but as a sequence of transformations necessarily linked to each other that imply the totality of the constructed world, from the urban fabrics, passing through the city, to the anthropized territory. In this way, the reasons for form and expression are also reached, due to the consolidation and transmission, through time and space, of constructive needs and customs, typical of the different geographical-cultural areas.
Why reinforced concrete? Because today is the building material par excellence. If on the one hand one can speak clearly of "elastic development", amply demonstrated by the widespread use of the structural framework in architecture, its "plastic potential", on the other hand however, seems to have not yet found a clear architectural definition. With "plastic" there is no reference to the "sculptural" aspect of such material, but to the constructive meaning of the term; that is, plastic as the ability of the material to reproduce new configurations after the "break" occurred caused by excessive loading; plastic as a union between quantities and capacities of transmission of loads; plastic, finally, as the ability to resist the material due to the shapes of the elements.
Through this critical filter one can read the history of architecture as a continuous process that has affected the matter that constitutes reality; matter for the first time "found" by the nomadic man and from which his special capacity was later recognized to be used as construction material given the sedentary needs that arose. The material becomes a building element, through a greater effort of man in its development. Such elements can be assembled in a structure from which the characters will be legible according to the geographic-cultural area of formation. The geographic-cultural area is understood as a portion of territory in which a large number of common characters can be recognized in the materials, in the elements and in the structures of the constructions (Strappa, 1995).[-]